From the trailers, and the general floating American superpatriotism
of the moment, one would assume that Collateral Damage would be one huge
Arnie-driven fireball of righteous American retribution. Here's where the
terrorists *get theirs!* Yeah! Arnie, blasting rockets and railguns left
and right, blowing terrorists out of watch towers and ammo dumps, bringing
the war to *them!* YEAH!

Except, it doesn't work that way. This movie was written and filmed
before everybody's favorite day last year, so it's got this weird, off-kilter
black-is-white view of America and terrorism. Now, since we've seen
it, we know that the natural reaction to a terrorist attack on American
soil is a burst of patriotism and a government more than eager to start
dropping bombs. We know that's what happens in real life.

Collateral Damage, however, is set in the Ramboverse of leftover Vietnam
anxiety where spindly politicians lack the will to do anything, so it falls
to private citizens like Arnold Shwarzenegger to get international justice
done, Arnie-style.

Or so you'd think. The director of Collateral Damage is Andrew Davis,
who's best known for The Fugitive. He's kind of a down-scale action director,
not so big on the cartoony set pieces of his colleagues. Thus, Collateral
Damage --despite its anachronistic misreading of the American response
to terrorism-- has a "real-life" kind of feel to it, from the cutesy iddle-widdle
explosion at the beginning to the Columbian harbors and location shots
that don't look like they've been tarted up with a bunch of computers.
Instead of the big, matrix-y version of Rambo 4 that the trailers and the
times seem to suggest, Collateral Damage comes across like something seriously
intended, like Proof of Life.

But at the same time, it stars Arnold Shwarzenegger. As somebody who's,
well, *not* Arnold Swarzenegger. All those big explosions in the trailer
aren't Arnie's doing. No, he's on the receiving end. In fact --unbelievably--
Arnie doesn't carry or use a gun even once in the whole movie. For the
first time in a long time, he's not playing a professional soldier or a
cop. Okay, he's a fireman, so he's still heroic, but he's supposed to be
a normal guy who hasn't been trained to kill people. So he doesn't blow
up any rebel camps with a rocket laucher in each arm, or get in any elaborate
knife fights, or conclude a knock-down, drag-out fight with the classic
neck-snap.

No, he's a regular guy trying in a sort of recognizably real-life fashion
to make his way into Columbia. Instead of two-fisting chainguns, he's wandering
around in markets, avoiding(!) rebels and trying to get a pass to go up
the river to get close to El Lobo (The Wolf).

Sometimes, it pays off. There's an early scene where he smashes up the
office of some pro-Columbian activists, and he comes off as a guy who's
furious and looking for somebody to beat up, but not as, you know, the
Terminator.

Still, he's just too big and German and Arnold Shwarzenegger to be a
regular guy. The simple fact is that this is not an Arnold Shwarzenegger
movie, but he's in it anyway. But at the same time, he's Shwarzenegger.
He can't not be Swarzenegger. So he's in one movie, and the movie is in
another movie, and sometimes, Arnold's movie kinda bleeds into this one.

So while he's supposed to be this regular dude, for instance, we get
a scene of the El Lobo (The Wolf) forcefeeding a snake to a failed lieutenant
in classic action-movie bad-guy style. Or a plot twist where Arnie saves
a woman and child from his own bomb, and then it turns out that they're
the wife and kid of El Lobo (The Wolf). This snapping back and forth from
cartoony to not is, well, goofy. Different from what you'd expect, but
still pretty silly.

So Collateral Damage is something of a surprise, at least. But worth
seeing, just for that? Not really.